“Here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our stage.”

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene 1

The opening gala of the Valley Performing Arts Center (VPAC) at California State University, Northridge celebrated the birth of a major new cultural destination.

Meanwhile, out of the public eye, a whole other world has stirred to life as faculty, staff and students have taken up residence in new spaces designed specifically to serve their academic needs.

In addition to the concert hall, the 166,000-square-foot complex includes a 178-seat Experimental Theatre, four theatre laboratories (for costume, set, lighting and design), studio facilities for the university’s award-winning KCSN-FM (88.5) public radio station, and the 230-seat Kurland Lecture Hall (whose use is not limited to those in the performing arts field). An enormous rehearsal studio boasts a sprung wood floor that makes it ideal for dance and other movement arts and one entire wall of glass that can be raised to fully open the room onto the central courtyard.

“Here new work will be created, new artists will be discovered and nurtured, and new careers will be launched,” says W. Robert Bucker, dean of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication and VPAC’s executive director.

In designing the building to serve both the community and the campus, project architect Kara Hill, with Minneapolis-based HGA Architects, drew on in-depth focus group meetings with the theatre department and other faculty and staff.

More than 275 CSUN students are enrolled as theatre majors, the majority as undergraduates. Rather than selecting a narrowly focused specialty, students in the program are required to take one-third history, one-third design/technical and one-third performance courses.

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Delivering the curriculum

According to Garry D. Lennon, who joined the CSUN theatre faculty in 1999 and was named chair of the department in 2011, this type of multidisciplinary education teaches students “to have a vision and know how to execute it.” Graduates of the pre-professional training program have applied their skills not only in theatre, film and academia, but in fields as diverse as law, education and landscape architecture.

Lennon, a veteran of the department’s former quarters in one of the oldest buildings on campus, describes what the new building means to him and his colleagues.

“In theatre you always make do. You get used to too small, to no natural light, to old equipment. You make it work. But now,” he says of the facilities, “it’s a whole new world. VPAC raises the respect for what we do, it elevates the whole enterprise philosophically and literally. It says this is a valid thing to be teaching. It’s a hard time for the arts right now and this kind of boost makes a big difference.”

Hands-on learning, enhanced within the new building, reinforces academic studies across the theatre arts curriculum and gives students a future advantage in the job market.

Community outreach and education

Leaving their cars and the city behind, visitors approach the gleaming new VPAC complex along a wide, welcoming path through a verdant orange grove, past ducks paddling in a pond and couples relaxing on park benches. They are going to see a play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a magical love story that unfolds in two separate but dynamically interconnected worlds.

As part of its opening-season repertoire in VPAC’s new Experimental Theatre, faculty and students presented a six-week run of the play, with evening performances for the public and matinee performances for school groups. In the 2010–11 school year, nearly 11,000 students attended the matinee performances at CSUN.

“In addition to our shows that travel out to high schools, we invite local school groups to tour the campus and attend a show here in the new theatre,” says Sandra B. Chong, director of arts education and evaluation, which includes the student matinee program, a collaboration between VPAC and the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication. “Because teenagers are often reading Shakespeare for the first time and most have never seen a live performance of his plays, CSUN provides teachers with professional development training and a helpful classroom study guide.”

The actors, on the other hand, may have surprisingly deep, even personal, connections to the Bard.

“I grew up with Shakespeare,” says CSUN student William Potter, whose mother and father—an actress and a theatre director—named their son after the playwright. Like most of the cast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Potter plays more than one part, in his case two of the leading roles: Theseus, ruler of Athens, and Oberon, king of the fairies.

“My dad has directed this play more than 16 times,” says Potter, “and neither of us expected I would get the part of Theseus.” But he was delighted that he did and is grateful to the play’s director, Melissa Chalsma, CSUN lecturer since 2003 and co-director of the nonprofit Independent Shakespeare Company, for being a great teacher and collaborator.

“I’m in Melissa’s movement class and we spend a lot of time on the topography of the stage. That class taught me so much about working in a space like this, in the round.”

Backstage areas bustling with activity

An hour before the matinee performance is scheduled to begin, student actors and dancers begin arriving backstage. Dressing rooms, green rooms, rehearsal spaces—all are modeled after identical spaces on VPAC’s professional operations side.

In the clean and spacious women’s dressing room, a floor-to-ceiling frosted-glass window lets in the bright, late-morning sun (natural light being a rare commodity in the cramped, windowless rooms that typically constitute backstage areas). The walls are lined with long mirrors, sleek black countertops and rolling ergonomic chairs. A young actress strums a ukulele, while several of her cast mates chat in clusters, putting on their make-up. Velvet, puffy-sleeved Elizabethan gowns share a tall costume rack with colorful contemporary fashions from a local H&M boutique, hinting at the play’s two disparate worlds and this production’s creative mash-up of historical periods. Beside a glittery pair of gold-painted platform boots worthy of Lady Gaga, a wardrobe assistant sets down a basket of freshly laundered white shirts.

Next door in the men’s dressing room, the camaraderie is several decibels louder. Music blares from a boombox as one student sails across the polished white floor on a fast-moving chair and two others engage in mock combat. Another taps away on an open laptop, oblivious to the ruckus. Despite the roughhousing and off-color jokes—perfectly in keeping, one realizes, with Shakespeare’s own often bawdy humor—the actors begin to focus, donning make-up and running lines as they slip into their costumes and characters. The actor who plays the young lover Lysander wears jeans and a sky-blue T-shirt with GREECE spelled out in white letters, a cheeky nod to the play’s Athens setting by the costume designer, department chair Lennon.

“Twenty minutes to places, everyone!” shouts stage manager Eduardo Arteaga, having pulled out his cell phone to double-check the time. With a cane and a commanding stride, he prowls the third-floor backstage corridor. “Doing my rounds,” he explains, “making sure everyone’s here and that there aren’t any problems.” In May, Arteaga completed a double major in English literature and theatre arts, and decided to stay on at CSUN to work on a teaching credential. Like many of his colleagues in the program, he often juggles work on several productions at a time, in addition to a full course load.

Arteaga is also a paid, part-time staff member of the new theatre. Other part-time student jobs at VPAC include ushering and staffing the concessions during performances in the main concert hall.

Introducing new audiences to the performing arts

Downstairs in the first-floor Experimental Theatre, children arriving by bus from several local middle and high schools have filed in and filled most of the 156 seats, rising up on all four sides of the theatre, configured for this performance in-the-round. The stage itself is bare but for a few cut-out paper stars, draped in painted lace and delicately illuminated, suspended from a tension grid high overhead.

“In Shakespeare’s age they had no scenery,” says theatre manager William Taylor. “That’s why the plays always open with the actors painting the set with their words, simply but efficiently.”

Accessible via catwalks on the second floor, the woven-steel grid soars 25 feet above the stage and allows the technical crew to hang scenery and position lights without using ladders, reducing the risk of accident while opening up new aesthetic possibilities—for example, in this production using ladders themselves as a creative solution to a limited budget for set design. Here, a ladder serves variously as a tree, a boat, an outdoor stage, a royal bed.

“Melissa brought in three of her own ladders to start, and asked the students to improvise with them,” recalls Taylor. “She was very open as we tried things out in the rehearsal lab. Her students went at it with zeal. In the final production, the way the ladders are used in a few scenes came directly out of the actors’ ideas and inspirations.”

Taylor also credits Melissa with making the production accessible to younger audiences who might be seeing Shakespeare for the first time.

“In Shakespeare’s time, he peppered the performances with popular songs and ballads of the day,” says Taylor, “and so did Melissa.” In a scene, the chart-topping “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry sets one of the forest fairies leaping into an exuberant solo dance number.

With each two-hour performance, youthful audiences have been captivated by the music and dance, the well-played characters and plot twists and even the language itself. Laughter increases steadily as the play progresses and audience members fall under its spell; more than once they’ve even delivered a standing ovation.

After taking their bows at the end of the show, the ensemble returns to the stage for a Q&A, answering audience questions with humor and insight. Asked what it’s like to work in the round as compared to a proscenium stage, one actor says candidly, “It’s intimidating! We can see your faces, we can see if you’re liking it or not liking it.” Another offers, “It’s awesome. Every side of the stage gets a different view, a different story.”

Teachers’ feedback on the performances has been overwhelmingly positive. They say that seeing the play brings their studies to life. “It opened my students’ eyes to the humor inherent in Shakespeare,” one teacher wrote in response to a survey, “and to the vitality of live theatre.”

“My students came to me with a dislike of drama, Shakespeare in particular,” wrote another. “They left your theatre excited, asking questions and wanting more. Bravo CSUN. You’ve shown Valley students that the world is bigger than an iPod screen.”

For design faculty, a dream come true

Lecturer Paula Higgins has taught costume technology at CSUN for 26 years. As she works with students in her pattern making and draping class—busily preparing for an upcoming production of Cabaret replete with leather corsets, plaid mini skirts and 1920s kimonos—she recalls that in her old classroom, four or five students at a time would share a single sewing machine. Here in her bright and spacious new lab, the Sherry and Albert Lapides Costume Lab, in a class as large as 20 students, each has their own sewing machine.

“Costume design is a very hands-on class,” says Higgins. “For so long we’ve been cramped in our space, and with this facility we can really do more. I’ve been waiting for this, things we never had before,” she adds, gesturing toward separate closed-door spaces off the main room, “a fitting room, a dye room, a laundry room. And we finally have a shop that was intended to be a shop.”

Junior Kelsey Porter pushes a headless mannequin wearing a silvery sequined dress the 46-foot length of the costume lab. Porter plays leading lady Sally Bowles in Cabaret, while also building costumes for the production and working on the tech crew.

“It’s a lot of responsibility,” she says, now seated on the floor putting finishing touches on the hem of the dress to be worn by one of the male actors. “Here in Theatre, if you don’t follow through on a deadline you put not only your own grade in jeopardy, but the whole production.”

Energy efficient, educationally extraordinary

If the CSUN campus were a ship, the Valley Performing Arts Center would be its impressive southern prow.

As Dean Bucker leads a first-time visitor on a walk-through of the building, he stops along the way to point out energy-efficient features that are helping the building qualify for LEED Gold certification—for example, the fluorescent lights high up in the vaulted ceiling, embedded behind horizontal white panels in a staccato arrangement. “It reminds me of a piano keyboard,” he says, lifting his eyes toward the ceiling.

Bucker, who also holds the title of music professor at CSUN, is former director of education for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. A passionate advocate for the arts and education, he has played a major role over the past four years in guiding the building toward completion, marrying its public operations and its academic functions into one synergistic and vibrant whole.

The tour culminates at the Porter Pavilion on VPAC’s breezy rooftop terrace, with its modern wooden deck, adjacent catering kitchen, cozy seating nooks and ornamental olive trees. Gazing out from this lofty vantage point, one savors panoramic views of the university campus and, in the distance, the spring-green hills and mountain ranges that define the San Fernando Valley.

“The topography of the Valley is so horizontal,” says Bucker, “that any kind of verticality gives you such great perspective.”

Gaining perspective. Some might call that a central purpose of higher education, and the Valley Performing Arts Center—now teeming with life and learning—stands as an extraordinary testament to CSUN’s commitment to fulfilling that purpose, today and for generations to come.

— Sylvia Sukop

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